The Probability Broach, chapter 8
For the second time since arriving in this world, Win Bear has narrowly escaped being murdered – this time in his bed, while he was still recuperating from the last attack.
The intruder was wounded in the struggle, but got away. Win’s counterpart, Ed, is searching for any evidence that he left behind:
He examined the empty window frame, leaning outward for a moment. “He left his ladder behind. Wait a minute… something here just below the sill.” He held up a plastic box the size of a cigarette pack, hanging from a skein of wires. “A defeater. Damps the vibrations caused by forced entry. Complicated, and very expensive. Only the second one I’ve seen since—”
“If that thing makes a humming sound, he should demand his money back. That’s what gave him away.”
“Excess energy has to be given off somewhere—heat or sonics. Maybe it just wasn’t his day.”
I snorted, surveying the shambles. “You didn’t see him lying on the ground out there?”
“No. Missed him by a mile. He probably picked up a fanny full of splinters, though.” He nodded toward the shattered window.
L. Neil Smith doesn’t linger on the implications of this passage, but I will: There are businesses in this society making products whose only use is to assist people to rob and kill others. There’s no purpose for a “defeater” that doesn’t involve crime.
Like several places in Atlas Shrugged, the author is saying one thing even as his own writing shows something else. Smith insists that the North American Confederacy is a peaceful utopia, where crime is virtually unknown because everyone carries the means of self-defense. People with criminal intent – he wants us to believe – are deterred by the knowledge that all their potential victims are armed.
What it actually shows, just as a critic of anarchism might point out, is that life without laws or government is far more dangerous. Widespread gun ownership doesn’t prevent crime; it just incentivizes criminals to get even bigger guns to overpower their victims. Weapons and other devices that would be banned in our world (in civilized countries, at least) are completely legal to manufacture and own.
You can put spinning spikes or flamethrowers on your car’s wheels, Mad Max-style, to get revenge if some jerk on the highway tailgates you. You can bury land mines in your front lawn or rig up lethal booby traps around your property, protecting against intruders but also endangering innocent visitors. You can set up machine guns or artillery pieces aimed at your neighbor’s house, just in case he does something that annoys you.
The next line drives this point home. Ed is apologetic about Win’s latest brush with death:
“My fault, really. I considered putting on extra security, but decided the autodefenses would be enough. Now I’ve let you get attacked again, in my own home.”
Ed’s house has “autodefenses”, not further described. Does everyone have these? You wouldn’t pay for something if you had a reasonable expectation of never needing it.
It goes to show, again, how the writing undercuts its own premises. Smith insists that everything is cheap in the NAC because anarchy is more efficient. There’s no wasteful government leeching off people’s productivity, so they get to keep everything they earn.
But his own plotting shows the opposite. Without a government, life isn’t cheaper. People just have to pay out of their own pockets to supply all the services that a government would normally provide.
You have to supply your own security, and if those “autodefenses” aren’t enough, you have to hire people to patrol your house (which Ed does after this scene).
If you care about your house burning down, you have to pay for a private firefighter service. You have to pay for private school instead of attending public school. You have to be your own bank regulator, investigating any bank you do business with to determine if they’re likely to collapse and lose your life savings. You have to be your own consumer-safety advocate, inspecting every product you buy to see if it’s toxic, flammable, or otherwise hazardous. You can probably think of more examples.
Given Ed’s description of the defeater as “expensive” and better than his home defenses, there’s yet another unpleasant implication. In this anarcho-capitalist utopia, everyday life is an arms race.
If you can outspend someone and buy tech to overcome their defenses, it’s completely feasible to kill them. Or to put it another way: if someone wants you dead and they have more money than you, you’re in big trouble. And if you’re poor (and can’t afford your own private security or a house with “autodefenses”), you have no chance at all.
After all, there’s no higher authority to investigate or hold criminals accountable. If you’re lucky enough to catch an assailant in the act, you can shoot them. But if a thug or a hitman succeeds in murdering their victim, they get away scot free. If Win’s midnight attacker had succeeded in murdering him in his bed, he could have escaped safe in the knowledge that no consequences would follow.
Even if the victim has friends or family who can afford to hire a private investigator, it’s unclear what that person would be able to do, since there’s no legal system. (Smith takes a stab at answering this question later in the book – his solution involves private arbitration and restitution or exile as punishments – but it has some very obvious holes, which we’ll go into.)
What it adds up to is this: if you’re living in Smith’s ancap society, you have to be on guard against attack at any moment, for your entire life. You have to protect yourself, because no one else will protect you. Win would have been killed, if not for the stroke of luck that he happened to be awake when the hitman broke in, and that’s a good template for how things would work in the North American Confederacy.
There’s good reason to be paranoid in this world. Everyone is armed, and everyone ought to be on a constant hair trigger, for fear that some casual encounter could be a robber or a murderer about to make their move. This society shouldn’t be peaceful and civilized, but a melee of bloody violence.
New reviews of The Probability Broach will go up every Friday on my Patreon page. Sign up to see new posts early and other bonus stuff!
Other posts in this series:
The most plausible scenario would be, I think, simply creating government under another name (assuming the more likely case, abandoning anarchism, just didn’t happen). Private police, courts etc could become a package deal if you subscribed, probably linked to gated communities. That could grow and merge easily to town and city size, then greater. Some of the anarchists propose exactly such ideas, but don’t appear to realize this is basically a state, there just would be a contract for it.
Now we get to it–this is what I’ve thought all along–in a government-less, police-less society, the strong take from the weak, and it’s a never-ending arms race in self-protection.
Of course the assailant has to get away. He can’t be caught this early! This is still the introduction.
Maybe the defeater is intended for military use? That’s all I can think of, but it doesn’t make sense either, because there are supposed to be no wars in this world. Why make military technology, then? Because you get rich doing it?
But in that case, there is a very obvious problem with their society. Money corrupts everything. We have the reviewers genuinely believing that in all stateless societies, private citizens have to cover the costs of government services themselves, and that mutual aid is but a dream. Why should their society have money at all? It’s not a law of nature that you must pay for goods and services. People used to just give them away freely. Heck, anyone who hasn’t forced a child to pay for their own birthday present knows that one can freely give something away without expecting payment. Without money there would be no motive for this arms race.
I don’t understand libertarians. They know so little of social relations that they can’t come up with a society that would work without authorial fiat. And it seems to be because they can’t drop the fantasy of getting much richer than their neighbors, instead of everything being equally available to everyone. They trust nobody, which is why their stateless proposal comprises atomized, paranoid individuals who would shank each other for a sandwich.
A different anarchist utopia can be found Eric Frank Russell’s novella “And Then There Were None”. Russell’s anarchists (the Gands) were pacifists and their chief enforcement mechanism was shunning. Nominally they lacked money, but considering money as a means of accounting for use in indirect barter there “obs” (obligations) functioned as an intangible currency. (The Rai stones of Yap are halfway there – the physical tokens exist, but ownership is determined by oral tradition rather than by possession. Similarities can be found in modern day society’s retreat from cash, but we had tangible records on paper, and now we have electronic records.
Inspired by Dawkins’ explication of evolutionary game theory in “The Selfish Gene”, I have adopted the metaphor of society as a conspiracy of doves (a conspiracy not to engage in Social Tennysonism or Hobbesian Anarchism). Such a conspiracy still needs enforcement mechanisms to deter potential defectors. And such mechanisms pretty much require institutions.
I see Ursula Le Guin’s Annaresti anarchists as having reinvented government.
@another stewart:
I think I remember that first story. It was fun, but yeah, it doesn’t really work for humans, at least not once scaled up past a small town.
As you say, the big problem in general is dealing with ‘defectors’, either by deterrence or by removal from the body politic by whatever mechanism. And I mean ‘defectors’ in the sense of the Prisoner’s Dilemma Cooperate/Defect decision (as you presumably did).
In the case of the small town shunning, one of the big issues is basically: can a con-man find new marks faster than the whisper network can catch up and warn them away? In a small town, that’s going to require leaving that small town fairly quickly after the first ‘defection’. I suspect it’s not entirely a coincidence that the estimated percentage of sociopaths (0.5-2%) is roughly the inverse of Dunbar’s number (100-150); Dunbar’s number is essentially ‘the number of social connections we can keep in play at once’. In a community smaller than that, everybody literally can know everybody else, and anybody breaking ranks gets quickly known for it.
(This of course is not always a good thing; just ask anybody with unusual but harmless hobbies from a small town.)
There are a number of social systems and ideologies that can work just fine in a small town that will fail catastrophically if scaled up to anything larger.
And, as noted, something like this only works by pure authorial fiat. In a world not being micromanaged by an author who doesn’t understand human nature, something like this would indeed collapse into Mad Max-style warlords pretty quickly (so a patchwork of totalitarian states where everybody not the warlord is second-rate at best), and then take multiple revolutions before enough people banded together and started trying to set up rules to prevent it from happening, thus forming a new ‘state’.
(Transforming from tyranny to something more democratic doesn’t require a revolution, but usually there needs to be at least the threat of one to make the people holding the power decide it’s safer for them in the long run to spread out some of the decision-making.)
Win is a police officer in the bad governmentally-oppressed US, and he seemed like he was not being faced with deadly force every few hours there. Interesting…
To be fair, he hadn’t gotten caught up in an evil conspiracy for most of his prior life. The minute he does, the assassins are on his tail, and that starts in his native world.
As the Twilight anti-fandom used to say, hate it for the right reasons.
This thinking also shows a fundamental misunderstanding by people pushing the armed society narrative. They think that criminals are making rational risk/reward decisions. Very few criminals are mafia bosses sitting around thinking about the risks vs the payout. Lots of petty thieves greatly overvalue the reward and underplay the risks of their action, even after having got caught multiple times. Street punks committing blatant muggings are looking for excessively risky situations, doing something exciting is half the point. Drug addicts looking for money for their next hit are barely thinking about consequences at all.
The one sentence description doesn’t really describe what a defeater is but a small portable device that actively dampens vibrations would have industrial and scientific uses. Sensor getting too much vibration? Stick a defeater on it and the problem is reduced.
Damps the vibrations caused by forced entry.
What’s it made of, unobtainium? ‘Cuz this is pure magical thinking. Which “vibrations caused by force entry” is he even talking about? The noise of glass breaking or doors being busted? Or the vibrations of a chainsaw cutting through a door? It certainly can’t dampen sound waves radiating away from it. Maybe the vibrations in the author’s head…?
@Brendan Rizzo: Good point, but from Win’s point of view, he’s been okay in what ought to be a somewhat dangerous job in the government-filled world, and as soon as he learns that the libertarian utopia exists, he’s set upon by killer after killer. Even if the narrative provides the justification you allude to, he ought to be scoffing every time his counterpart and friends suggest that their world is safer than his.